It was a quick read. I finished John O'Hara's novel Hope of Heaven yesterday. It's a fast short novel. His third. Very modern, tightly composed, and the critics hated it. I'm not sure why. But I can venture a guess.
You're not likely to read it (though it's only two bucks for the Kindle edition), so let me ruin it for you. O'Hara's alter ego, Jim Malloy ("The Doctor's Son" stories) is the narrator. He's a writer, currently getting a thousand a week in Hollywood. This was in the 1930s during the Depression when that was real money.
The description on Amazon says it is from the "doomed romance" genre. Had no idea that was a genre. Science fiction and detective stories are genres. Hope of Heaven just struck me as tragic, fast, and Los Angeles with Hollywood's motor running in the background.
Malloy and Peggy Henderson are fooling around, pretending to have a casual sex arrangement. Then Malloy wants to be in love with her and she wants to be in love with him. That starts to happen and the force that drives such things leads them to the brink of marriage. He gets her an engagement ring and rents an expensive house with a "negro couple" to take care of things there.
Then her long lost father shows up. By a long stretch of coincidence (it eventually turns out) he is a private detective looking for someone (coincidence) who has approached Malloy for help based solely on also being from one town over back in Pennsylvania and knowing Malloy's brother.
This guy cashed someone else's traveler's checks. Peggy's father is looking for him. Malloy lets him know. He takes a powder. That flap of the plot disappears with the traveler's check casher. O'Hara is in a hurry to finish the novel and get to his main revelation (there are many very interesting revelations along the way; O'Hara is expert at exploring character and language, sometimes both at the same time, because they indicate each other).
The big moment comes when Mr. Henderson accidentally kills his son, Peggy's beloved younger brother Keith. She is destroyed by this. She didn't much like the father when he returned after many years. Her and Keith's mother has passed. They live modestly. She's a Communist (although I don't think O'Hara calls her that directly, it's what she is: she goes to meetings). She works at a bookstore; Keith goes to college. Mr. Henderson, the father, is an intruder. Then he accidentally shoots Keith.
This is what ends the romance between Malloy and Peggy. She can't marry him because he reminds her both of her father and her dead brother. She can't do it. Malloy has, she says, the same don't give a damn attitude as her father and the same joy, when he's happy, as her brother.
End of story. O'Hara takes liberties in telling it fast. But the big question is why did he personally inscribe a copy of it to his own and only daughter, only child, Wylie, and write in it that it was his best work?
I think I know why. Because it's the plainest study of the most crucial element of human character, the falling in love part, and then the telling of the hall of mirrors aspect where the mind of Peggy is irretrievably altered by a tragedy, so that she can never look at Malloy without seeing both her father and brother.
We don't see Malloy in pain, adrift, broken hearted, utterly changed himself, but he is, and O'Hara's being quiet about that is the sound of the book. He doesn't want Malloy to echo with emptiness. The reader has to go out of his or her way to get it. Peggy's emptiness is spelled out, more or less, but not Jim Malloy's.
Now, why did the critics attack it so viciously, along with this biographer Wolff decades later? I'll offer one theory on that. Malloy (O'Hara) was respectful, because he loved her, of Peggy's commitment to the Cause. But he was not sufficiently respectful of the Cause itself. He was moderately dismissive of it. And this was the 1930s, when those committed to the Cause openly, and even more so secretly, were very serious indeed. Hope of Heaven was deemed unworthy.
